


Days of Future Borscht

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Chicago (City), Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Snrfksgh, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29244753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Chicago in February. Not when you’d want heat to fail.
Relationships: Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin, Xi'an Coy Mahn/Kitty Pryde
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Days of Future Borscht

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after Mekanix no. 6 and before X-Treme X-Men (vol. 1) 25.

Why can’t Kitty get back to sleep? What’s wrong? She woke up fitfully once again, the moon still high, the few streetlights giving no warmth to 57th Street.

Maybe she shouldn’t be here. After the mess with the Sentinel attacks, Kitty had considered just moving in with Xi’an—the kids loved her-- but the place was a bit full, and as long as she kept tending bar at Belles of Hell (no relation to the Hellfire Club) she could afford her own studio farther down 57th, with the same friendly (and mutant-friendly) super. And when was the last time she had her own place? Not in the X-Mansion. Or the lighthouse. Or the barracks during her brief and ridiculous time at SHIELD. The less said about that better.

A typical weekday for Kitty was lab till 7pm, grocery, dinner at Xi’an’s with the kids, Xi’an hangouts till 10pm, closing at Belles, and home before 3am, and then back at the lab by 8. Some of Kitty’s friends might call her low-sleep life-plan unsustainable. It certainly tired her out.

Especially today. She had come home from a ton of mop-centric cleanup, turning the keys in all three heavy doors, climbing both flights of stairs, then crawling under every one of her blankets-- the blue one, the blue-and-silver one, the red one Rachel gave her in Scotland, the Elfquest one—and trying to fall asleep…. and waking, numb…. and waking…. and trying.

Usually she was completely worn out—in a good way, a friendly way—by her shift at Belles. If you’re used to rogue agents of the Pentagon trying to kill you with nanotechnology, drunk guys who can’t wait for their pitcher of PBR? that’s not a problem, that’s a relief, even if it kept her on her feet. Come home late and pleasantly exhausted, drift off fast, wake up ,hit the lab. Then do it again. There was excitement in her way of life—excitement daily, to tell the truth—but it all came from new relays and better approximations of phi sub 5 in the osmium substrate. Or from gaming with Xi’an and the medium-sized cousins.

So why couldn’t Kitty stay asleep tonight? The first and second times she figured just nerves from the Sentinel attack, or nerves about Shola and Tom, or nerves about whether Leong and Nga would wake up asking for Kitty and missing her. (She saw them most afternoons, and every Sunday.) 

The fourth time she figured it out: her place was freezing. Sometime before she came back from her shift the whole heating system had failed. Her wooden desk was cold, her kitchen table felt like an icebox, and the pile of blankets on her mattress (it was a lovely, soft mattress—who needed a box spring?) was turning crisp and hardening with the chill. Chicago in February. Not when you’d want heat to fail.

Kitty tucked her sleeveless sleep shirt—the last of her Elfquest gear from the X-Mansion— around her shoulders, threw on her stripey red sleep shorts, and ventured into the hallway, phasing through the door so as not to blast other tenants with her room's cold air. Was anyone else in danger of freezing to death? Did they need saving?

Preliminary answer: no. Her breath made streaks in the air of her studio apartment, but in the dim hallway, none: she could feel her flesh returning to normal, not working so hard to keep her semi-warm, as she headed down the hallway, solid again, to the stairs and to a corner window. She could see the old stone building where Xi’an still lived with her niece and nephew. She could head over there. She missed sleeping near Xi’an. She wanted to get even closer, sometimes, but they never had the space or else never had the time. There was that one almost kiss… and she knew Xi’an liked girls….

Kitty liked being an auntie, and maybe they’d hook up romantically someday, but really Xi’an needed someone who could give her everything, not just some things some of the time. Kitty could date three people at once, and had, and maybe would again: Xi'an needed one and only one. Otherwise they would have kissed. And right now Xi’an needed her sleep. As did Leong and Nga. No going over there between midnight and dawn unless she had to.

But her own tiny apartment, as she let herself back in, felt like a meat locker. Maybe she had to…

The studio filled with moonlight. No, sunlight. No, starlight, but the kind she’d only seen in space, when her ship got close to a star. No, eldritch light, spreading in circles…

“Roomie! Did you miss me?”

“Ilya!” Kitty’s shocked. Kitty has no idea. She can’t stand up; she certainly can’t lie back down. Instead she’s clinging to her faded sleep shirt, rolling the hem between her fingers, open-mouthed, breath making feathers of frost in the air. She’s just seen a ghost. Her first love, come back as a ghost.

“I know, roomie. You weren’t expecting me. Here’s what up.” Illyana has her familiar bangs, shoulder-length hair, a black sleeveless tee, three silver bangles on her left arm, black jeans and tennis shoes. Of course she holds her sword. Of course she lets the sword un-manifest, back into the ether, now that she knows it’s Kitty, just Kitty, shivering on the mattress down there, sitting upright, wondering. “Good news, I think: I’m alive. Not now, this year. I’m still dead this year. But in the future. I come back. It’s pretty complicated and you don’t want to know about it, but if you wait long enough and stay alive we’re together and teach in the same school. Sort of. Yeah, I know. I come back. I…”

Illyana kneels and they embrace, first tentatively, then boldly, warmly, the dark-haired American’s curls falling over the blonde Russian’s shoulders, the two women’s bodies fitting together into each other’s curves as if they had never been apart.

“Ilya, you…” Kitty’s not shivering from the cold any more: she’s shivering from the surprise. She’s been to the future, more than once, but she’s never visited her own past.

“My stepping discs can traverse time as well as space. I’m not as bad at that as I used to be. I can target about half the time.”

“And you—you—why now?” Kitty’s mind is racing. The physics part wants to know how Illyana’s journeys through Limbo animate tachyons in our world. The Sapphic part wants Ilya under the covers, now.

“I heard you had a problem with your radiator. Student apartments, right? It is February in Chicago?”

“It is and I was so cold a minute ago and I missed you and we belong, Kate—no, that’s in the future for you—Kitty--”

And now the present-day University of Chicago graduate student is under her duvet, under her felted blanket, under her soft linen sheets, on her mattress with the girlfriend from her past who is also her girlfriend from the future, and they’re kissing, hard, and they’re grinding and almost burrowing into each other’s bodies like they’ll never get the chance to do this again, even though—Kitty knows—Illyana’s presence as a visitor from the future means they will get to do this again. She strokes Illyana’s smooth, well-muscled arm, from wrist to shoulderblade, and scritch-scratches the back of her neck, and Illyana makes a sound almost like giggling and kisses her again.

Then Kitty shivers. Love can keep your heart warm but it can raise a thermostat by only so much. Illyana runs her own hand down Kitty’s other arm and she notices gooseflesh. Illyana snaps her fingers.

There are thick red candles all over the apartment, on textbooks, on chairs, on an unwashed dinner plate in Kitty’s sink. Their smokeless flames, together, warm Kitty up just a little. Mostly the warmth is Illyana’s body, stronger than before, more assured—the kind of assurance you get from other partner, Kitty realizes, and she’s happy about that—and then she lets herself feel the black denim of Illyana’s legs between her own, which are bare. She closes her eyes and her back arches, ready for more than any kiss could bring.

“Mmmm, this is fun,” Illyana says.

“Mmmm, that’s an understatement,” Kitty says, slightly slurring her words. It’s late at night and she’s warm now, but not warm enough.

“There’s only so long I can stay without breaking the universe.”

“Come back, then. Come back all the time,” Kitty says, one hand now inside Illyana’s T-shirt.

“Some times. My Kate—my Kitty, right now. When they’re time. We’ve got time,” Illyana says, shimmying her torso so that Kitty’s hands brush her nipples. The contact lights tiny fires inside them both. Illyana notices how Kitty’s body has curves: she’s thinner than she’ll be in their shared future, but more developed than when they first started dating, at school, in the past. Back then she had camisoles and training bras and softness: now she's soft but also solid, and she must need a real bra when she goes to work. This version of Kitty has just survived a Sentinel attack and she's working two jobs, right? Or is it three? All the versions are good, she thinks. It won’t be so long till she’s her own confident Kate. “I can’t stay but I’ll keep you warm when you get too cold.”

“I’ll never be cold again,” Kitty mumbles, opening her lips, ready to lick Illyana through her clothes. That’s a thing Kitty does. Like a cat. Her tongue feels raspy to Illyana, too. Like a real cat. It’s fun. it’s absurd and hot and Illyana really wants to stay for that but soon—Kitty can tell from Illyana’s back and forth under the duvet, the way her body wants two things at once—soon, too soon, the timestream’s workings mean she’ll have to go.

From out of a hole in the air Illyana produces a bowl, black porcelain, with an unadorned metal spoon, and then another bowl with another spoon. Steam rises from them both. She places the bowls on a raised tray on the floor. There’s a white flourish on top of something burgundy and mildly sweet and thick and hot. It’s hot borscht.

“With meat or without?” There’s one of each. “Usually Katya-borscht is vegetarian, I know, but it’s a cold night.”

“Mmmmmmeat,” Kitty, slowed down by surprise, decides.

Illyana speaks and a sigil in the shape of a ladle glows beside her mouth. She shoves one bowl back through a slot in the air and pulls out another. Now both bowls look identical.

They sup and gaze into each other’s eyes. Kitty blinks a lot so she can open her eyes afterwards and see that her girlfriend’s still there. (She’s also tired. So tired. At some point she’s going to have to calculate phi-sub-two again before the alpha particles accumulate. But not tonight.)

When the bowls are empty—Illyana licks hers clean—they snuggle back together under the duvet. The mutant from Deerfield, so social throughout her new life in Chicago, still so alone, wants everything now. She wants Illyana’s whole body, Illyana’s calves, her knees, her thighs. Her nipples, standing out below the black tee. There’s something about pronounced breasts in a muscular frame, something metaphysically right for Kitty to snuggle her own ribs again. Something about a soft space where they can protect each other. Where they can do things nobody else can know, even in the future when they let everyone know.

“In the future,” Kitty asks, “does everyone know?”

“About us?” The taller Russian woman looks hard at her past and future girlfriend, both of them with their heads up from under the covers, silhouettes in moonlight. Illyana’s body radiates heat. Her tail manifests and, thrillingly, wraps Kitty’s ankle. “In the future we don’t have to tell them. They figure out it.” Illyana stops for a moment. “My Kate. My backpack. My pirate queen.”

“Pirate what?” Warmed by her girlfriend’s body, excited by everything she can now feel, by cotton and skin and nipple and tail and Illyana’s bare feet against Kitty’s soft fluffy gray socks, Kitty’s also confused. Will she change her name? Will she sail the seas?

“I’ve already said too much for now. I’m sorry. I know I’ll come back. I know a time loop when I see one. You’ll come back to me. I’ll come back for you. I’ll always come back. I don’t abandon my friends,” Illyana says, and then looks around the apartment. All those candles, the fluffy duvet… something’s missing. “I know I’m a tease. I can’t help it. But I come back. I won’t let my hot girlfriend stay cold.”

“But—but—”

“I’m sending a friend to take care of you for now.”

The moonlight—no, the light of the stepping disc—grows until Illyana has stepped back through it, into Limbo, into a future where they’re together for real, a future that’s better than anything Kitty could have expected when she left the X-Men for what? the fourth time? and returned to her favorite city, her favorite non-mutant school.

The candles are gone. She shivers again. Was that all? She looks for her new square cellular phone, getting ready to wake Xi’an up after all: she can’t stay the night in this walk-in fridge of a studio, with its big windows and its Lake Michigan weather. The warmth of the wedge-shape firmness at the end of Illyana’s tail, the warmth that radiated all the way up Kitty’s body, making her flush and inhale—that warmth is fading already. There’s still no heat. There won’t be heat, or a chance to visit the heated lab, till morning.

There’s a flapping sound and a swooshing sound and sparks in the air. It’s warm again and cozy and there’s a new scent in the air, like linens and leather and cardamom.

Something—no, someone—shows purple in the moonlight and settles down next to a no-longer-so-lonely Kitty. Plumes of fire extend harmlessly from the purple bundle of squirming heat up into the air. Wings fold as the familiar creature settles into the crease of Kitty’s elbow, extended his head and beak to nuzzle his favorite human.

“Lockheed!” Of course it’s Lockheed. He's like a golden retriever crossed with a space heater, right now, and his two dragon heartbeats are inexhaustible, radiant, all the comfort the future Kate's body and psyche need. Probably he can't stay, any more than Illyana could-- probably it's future Lockheed. But who knows? The space dragon will figure it out.

"Snrfksghl!" Lockheed says. The ridge down his back, between his wings, feels like a hot-water bottle, like an electric blanket rolled up in the softest cylinder ever, like skin to skin. Maybe that snarfling sound was space dragon for snuggle. Maybe it means "Leong and Nga are going to love me." Definitely it means that even in Chicago, even in the trough of winter, in the letdown after her first love has to return to the future, through the waiting, through the cold times to come, Lockheed will try his best to keep Kitty warm.


End file.
